The world’s largest multinational corporations have been riding a three-decade wave of profit growth, market expansion, and declining costs. Yet this unprecedented run may be coming to an end.
A new McKinsey Global Institute report, Playing to win: The new global competition for corporate profits, projects that the global corporate-profit pool, which currently stands at almost 10 percent of world GDP, could shrink to less than 8 percent by 2025, undoing in a single decade nearly all of the corporate gains achieved relative to the world economy during the past 30 years.
From 1980 to 2013, vast markets opened around the world while corporate-tax rates, borrowing costs, and the price of labour, equipment, and technology all fell.
The net profits posted by the world’s largest companies more than tripled in real terms from $2 trillion in 1980 to $7.2 trillion by 2013,1 pushing corporate profits as a share of global GDP from 7.6 percent to almost 10 percent. Today, companies from advanced economies still earn more than two-thirds of global profits, and Western firms are the world’s most profitable. Multinationals have benefited from rising consumption and industrial investment, the availability of low-cost labour, and more globalized supply chains.
But according to MGI, there are indications of a very significant change in the nature of global competition and the economic environment. While global revenue could increase by some 40 percent, reaching $185 trillion by 2025, profit growth is coming under pressure. This could cause the real-growth rate for the corporate-profit pool to fall from around 5 percent to 1 percent, practically the same share as in 1980, before the boom began.
Part of the slowdown in profit growth will come from the competitive forces unleashed by two groups of hard-charging competitors. On one side is an enormous wave of new companies based in emerging economies, who can develop international competitive abilities by stronger consumption in their home markets. The most prominent have been operating as national industrial giants for decades, but over the past 10 to 15 years, they have reached massive scale in their home markets. Now they are expanding globally, just as their predecessors from Japan and South Korea did before them.
On the other side, high-tech companies are introducing new innovative business models and striking into new sectors. And the tech giants themselves are not the only threat. Powerful digital eco-system platforms such as Alibaba and Amazon serve as launching pads for thousands of small and midsize enterprises, giving them the reach and resources to challenge larger companies.